Retrieving Supporting Evidence for Generative Question Answering
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current large language models (LLMs) can exhibit near-human levels of performance on many natural language-based tasks, including open-domain question answering. Unfortunately, at this time, they also convincingly hallucinate incorrect answers, so that responses to questions must be verified against external sources before they can be accepted at face value. In this paper, we report two simple experiments to automatically validate generated answers against a corpus. We base our experiments on questions and passages from the MS MARCO (V1) test collection, and a retrieval pipeline consisting of sparse retrieval, dense retrieval and neural rerankers. In the first experiment, we validate the generated answer in its entirety. After presenting a question to an LLM and receiving a generated answer, we query the corpus with the combination of the question + generated answer. We then present the LLM with the combination of the question + generated answer + retrieved answer, prompting it to indicate if the generated answer can be supported by the retrieved answer. In the second experiment, we consider the generated answer at a more granular level, prompting the LLM to extract a list of factual statements from the answer and verifying each statement separately. We query the corpus with each factual statement and then present the LLM with the statement and the corresponding retrieved evidence. The LLM is prompted to indicate if the statement can be supported and make necessary edits using the retrieved material. With an accuracy of over 80%, we find that an LLM is capable of verifying its generated answer when a corpus of supporting material is provided. However, manual assessment of a random sample of questions reveals that incorrect generated answers are missed by this verification process. While this verification process can reduce hallucinations, it can not entirely eliminate them.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.089 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".